In a recently closed Pit thread, this situation was brought up where a desperate parent, realizing that two of her children hadn’t escaped from a carriage house fire, went in, in a desperate attempt to save them. And all three perished.
A number of issues seem to me to be relevant to this event. First on my mind is going to be fire safety. Another issue is what some people have called The Cult of the Child. For my own ease I’m going to break this into two related discussions, rather than one horribly bogged down mess.
I’d already spoken in the closed thread about how many people never consider taking the time, during a catastrophe, to step back mentally and ask the vital question: How can I help without compounding the problem?
It’s not something people like to think about.
IMNSHO, a good fire safety plan should have several legs. [ul][li]First leg: smoke detectors. Do you have working smoke detectors, and do you check them? []Second leg: Evacuation plan. Do you have an evactuation plan, with two exits from each bedroom? Have you ever practiced it? []Third leg: fire extinguishers. Do you have any, are they properly maintained, and do you know how to use them? [*]Fourth, and final, leg. Optional. First Aid/lifesaving/CPR. Do you know how to keep someone alive until help arrives? [/ul][/li]
Considering the story in the linked article, I have to admit I suspect that the family failed the two younger girls on both the first and second legs. The way I’m reading it, I’d consider the structure called a carriage house to be similar to a detached garage. Because there is often no intent for people to live in such a structure, I suspect that building and fire codes do not require such structures to be wired for smoke alarms. And, because the carriage house was not a residential building, there was also probably no evacuation plan.
So, on a planning level, I think there were some failures. I’m not saying they aren’t completely understandable. I’m not trying to say that the family should have expected something like this. However it came to happen, I suspect that the family made assumptions about the safety of the structure, since it was a permanent and recently refurbished one. To wit, it was as safe as the house, and there fore no further precautions needed to be taken. Let alone considering extra precautions because the building was less safe than the house. Obviously, I’ve got no evidence for this, other than the article says that the family woke up smelling smoke, and that there seems to have been no report of a smoke alarm going off in the carriage house. I think it’s a reasonable guess, but it is only a guess.
The most tragic moment, of course, was when the parents awoke to the catastrophe in progress: fire and smoke engulfing the carriage house, and no sign of their girls. I want to repeat, it is completely, utterly understandable how a parent would run into a structure without pausing even a moment to consider the risks. Or, as much as it pains me to say this, the likelihood that by that point the two girls were already dead from smoke inhalation. If I had been a witness that night, I’d have rushed in myself. I’m terrible about judging safety for rescuers, which is one reason I’m both sympathetic towards the impulse and frustrated when people keep falling to it. I’d like to think I’d have paused to grab a fire extinguisher, myself - but, then, I’ve had some fire/rescue training.
Now we come to the point that had the previous thread derailed: The OP made the claim that the mother in this case had sacrificed her life, and abandoned her duty, on the altar of doing everything for her children. Or to use the expression that he and a few others have mentioned: The Cult of the Child. I think I’ve made clear that I don’t think that the woman involved in this did anything unusual, nor blameworthy. There are clear points, which I think I’ve shown, where better decisions could have been made. But the chain of reasoning behind the poor decisions is one that I know I could have fallen into, and which many other people could have fallen into.
But, at what point can one balance a parent’s obligations to one child, or to a spouse, against the more immediate, bur forlorn, needs of another child? For all I disagreed with the vitriol of the OP in the closed thread, I have to admit I think that he had one thing right: The rational choice for the mother should have been to stay out of the burning structure, and try to support her surviving family through the aftermath of this catastrophe.
I can’t say for certain which issues Zoe wanted to see discussed from that thread, but these are the two that I find worth salvaging from that wreck:
Have you established your fire safety plan for your house? If you have, when was the last time you practiced it? Similarly, have you ever practiced with any kind of firefighting, or using a fire extinguisher?
I hope that by bringing these questions to mind can have the benefit that some people will establish such plans for themselves. And more, should they ever end up in an emergency situation, that they’ll be a little more likely to pause and consider, “Can I do something here without becoming just another part of the problem?”
On a meta-scale, perhaps we can also discuss a little where do you draw the lines between risks and sacrifices that a parent should be expected to meet, and those where other duties may prevent a parent from taking such, no matter how much the obvious pull may be to do anything for one’s child.